"It was so much fun, one employee who was in Brno came, came from work and went from there to work. And he said that when he drove across the border, there were troops everywhere. My wife was thinking at the time and she said we don't know what's going to happen. We had Russians everywhere, all over the country, but we still had time. It was 1968 and we said we would wait. When two years had passed, we said we weren't going home. So it took us longer, but we are still here till today."
"When we flew to Chile, Yugoslavs joined us on the plane. They were dudes, dudes with shoes all trampled, everything pulled up, drinking... we looked like poor people. Then we laughed when we got them and beat them."
"I was such a fool that I even practiced very well. Different exercises and I was running and doing ping-pong. Table tennis. Nobody knows what ping-pong is nowadays. I used to go to Sokol regularly. That's why we were with the Sokol at the reunion." - "What made the decision that the football won?" - "During the war, I remember we had a neighbor, and so it was, is, and will be that only whoever had the most money had the ball. A boy in our street had a ball and we used to go to a barn that is no longer there. He would always bring a ball that he didn't know how to handle, and you could see that he wasn't going to be a football player, whereas I guess it was obvious to us. So we'd kick in that door, we'd practice and we'd play on the sidewalk. We weren't allowed on the field yet, we were too young for that. At the same time, we were admiring the football players. Dobiáš, Nejedlý, who had been playing in the league for a year or two. I just lived in it and I wanted to be a football player."
Josef Kadraba was born on 29 September 1933 in Řevničov and spent his childhood in nearby Rakovník, where his family moved at the beginning of the war. His father worked in the Budoucnost cooperative, his mother was a housewife. He had a younger sister and an older brother. From childhood he wanted to be a footballer. He started in Olympia in Rakovník, in 1951 he went to SK Rakovník, in 1953 he moved to Slavoj Liberec, during the war he played for the club Tankista Praha. After the war he went to Sparta Prague and after his wedding in 1958 he moved to Kladno, where he was offered an apartment. In 1962, he joined the Czechoslovak national team, which returned from the World Championship in Chile with a silver medal. He then spent two years with Slavia in Prague, where he retired in 1967. In the same year he got a job opportunity in Austria, where he went legally with his wife. In 1972, when Czechoslovakia refused to extend his legal residence, he decided to stay in Austria. He was sentenced in absentia to two years imprisonment for illegally leaving the republic and his football achievements and merits were to be forgotten. Josef Kadraba played in Austria for FC Hinteregger, HAC Vienna and Slovan Vienna. From 1979 to 1983 he only coached and then played tennis recreationally. He was a member of the League Cannoneers Club and scored 117 goals. He made 17 appearances for the national team and scored nine times, scoring in the semi-final match against Yugoslavia at the World Championships in Chile. Josef Kadraba died on 5 August 2019.
